It Never Can Happen Again. William De Morgan

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СКАЧАТЬ it had not been for cod-liver oil, and restraints, and mustard poultices that printed her small chest red, she would have regarded the whole thing as a lark, especially in view of the banquets that accompanied it. And was she not assured that Daddy was having the same, only heaps more? The oil was the worst trial. It pretended to be tasteless certainly, but that was mere pharmaceutical hypocrisy; the bottles knew better, whatever the labels might say. Her first hearing of the name of this nasty elixir vitæ produced a curious confusion in her mind, the revelation of which shocked Miss Fossett, taxed Yorick's command of his countenance, and made the doctor chuckle at intervals all the way home. For she recalled an occasion on which the Rev. Wilkinson Wilkins had denounced "ungodly livers." Herein lay great possibilities of misapprehension, and Lizarann was not slow to infer that cod-liver oil was divine, as opposed to some still worse abomination on draught in the opposite camp—devil-liver oil, perhaps!

      The foregoing shows to what an extent Teacher had turned her residence next door to the School into a hospital for the accommodation of this case. The good-natured lady was always liable to get involved in the fortunes of any of her young students, and though the present one had no claim on her that a hundred others might not have had, she was no doubt a lovable child, and her courage under trial had fairly engaged the affections of the Rev. Athelstan. Now Yorick had always been an idol of Adeline Fossett's from the day when he was first introduced to her, a girl his junior in years, but older than he for all that, as an Eton friend to whom her favourite brother probably owed his life. She had been much in his confidence in the years that followed; had been his great friend and adviser all through his Oxford days; had sympathized with him in all his youthful love-affairs. Why it was invariably taken for granted that he and she were always to beat up different covers for a lifelong mate it would have been difficult to say. But so it was, and so it continued, quite to the seeming satisfaction of both. She remained his confidante during all the hesitations and perplexities of his courtship of Sophia Caldecott, while only giving a qualified approval to his choice; and when he departed, beaming, with that young lady on a wedding-tour, she honestly believed that her own burst of tears as soon as she found herself, after the day's excitement, alone with her sense that the world had got empty and chill, was due to the fact that Yorick had married, as she viewed the matter, the wrong sister—Sophia instead of Elizabeth, her great friend. Sophia was the pretty one, of course! But men were blind!

      Adeline's life was so interwoven with that of a brother who, she believed, would certainly never marry that she looked on herself as not entered for the race of life at all. The idea held her with such force that she could build castles in the air for a bosom friend without a suspicion of a wish for self-election to their suzerainship. Sophia—once fourteen, and nothing—changed into a woman and captured the best castle for herself. Is it certain that Elizabeth's entry into that castle would have left Adeline's world so much less empty and chill? Who can say? All there is room to tell here is that Sophia's death came in a few years; and that Adeline's contemplation of Elizabeth's instalment as Queen Regent, without rights of coronation, was productive of involutions of thought and feeling that would have baffled Robert Browning. She was glad to believe she believed her secret grief that Yorick and Elizabeth could never be man and wife genuine. Perhaps it was.

      Very likely the readiness of Miss Fossett to harbour and cherish Lizarann does not want such an elaborate explanation. Lizarann, as the story has shown, was far from being an unattractive scrap in herself, although the mouth was too large for beauty—no doubt of it! She was especially so in these well-washed days when Miss Fossett went after her own very early breakfast to wake her in the morning; or, if awake, to prevent her trying to get up before Dr. Ferris came.

      "Maten't I go to see Daddy to-day, Teacher?" she said—always the first question—one such morning about a month after her appropriation by Miss Fossett.

      "Maten't you—funny child! Mayn't you's what you mean. No, dear, you mayn't—not yet! No till Dr. Ferris says yes. You must be a good little girl and have patience." For Miss Fossett knew children too well to weep with them invariably in their troubles. Here was one that would bear a bracing treatment. Its effect this time was that a sob never came to maturity—was resolutely swallowed—and that the career of a couple of tears was nipped in the bud by a nightgown-sleeve. A sniff made a protest in their favour, but cut a poor figure. Courage had the best of it.

      "Mustn't I only send a kiss to Daddy, Teacher?" Lizarann says this very ruefully.

      "Teacer!" Miss Fossett mimics her pronunciation. "Of course you may, dear, as many as you like! You give them to me, and I'll see that Daddy gets them." This is very rash, as Lizarann springs like a tiger, and discharges a volley that would have kept a game of kiss-in-the-ring going for a fortnight. An evil, you will say, easily endurable by a childless woman, with perhaps a hungry heart! Agreed. But embarrassing complications followed. As soon as Lizarann, who was evidently going to be much better to-day, had disposed of a very respectable breakfast for an invalid, and was brought into good form to receive the doctor—she was very nice when she smelt of soap, was Lizarann—her mind harked back on the kissing transaction.

      "Who shall you give the skisses to, to tike to Daddy?"

      "Never you mind! Daddy shall get them, and that's enough for any little girl at this time in the morning. Now lie still and be good. There's Dr. Ferris's knock."

      Lizarann complied. But curiosity rankled. Would Miss Fossett entrust those kisses to Dr. Ferris to give to Daddy? That was the substance of the question that came in perfect good faith from the pillow Lizarann was lying still and being good on. And this with Dr. Ferris audible below!

      "Most certainly not! I don't know him well enough." This was very decisive; and Lizarann's impersonal mind discerned in it a mistrust of the goods reaching their destination. Dr. Ferris might give them to someone else. Another carrier must be found.

      "But you do the gentleman?"

      "Yes, of course! I could give them to the gentleman. But we'll do better than that, Lizarann. I'll give them back to you, and you'll give them to the gentleman." An arrangement that pleases Lizarann, whose allegation that there was siskteen, makes the refund a long job. It lasts till the doctor knocks at the room door.

      "Who were you talking to, Doctor?" Lizarann's tickle is still on the speaker's face, as she smooths matters—hair and such-like.

      "It's the aunt, Widow Steptoe...."

      "Do take care, Doctor!"

      "Oh—I forgot! It's all right, I think, though ... she wants a testimonial, to say she can cook. She can't, of course! How's the patient?"

      "Look and see! I suppose I must see Mrs. Steptoe. She wants to talk, you know. I could just as easily write to this Mrs. What's-her-name ... oh yes; I know who it's for ... as have a long talkee-talkee. If she keeps me, come in as you go, to tell me."

      There is a twofold advantage in the loss of a husband who is a curse to your existence—who is bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh, with all the disadvantages of a community of goods, such as was endured by Zohak the tyrant, who shared his with two serpents that had grown out of him, and partook of him at intervals. One gain is, that your husband is now no more—as the vernacular puts it when not claiming various forms of hereafters for the departed; the other, that we may now mourn his loss and ascribe beauties of character to him without fear of his coming to life to give them practical disclaimers. We can do it with crape, and if we can't afford a pair of black kids, Lisle thread lasts a long time, if wore careful; indeed, Mrs. Hacker, whose testimony we are quoting, was able to dwell on the cheapness of job-lots in the article of mourning, and the advantages we enjoy from sales—advantages unknown to Zohak in his day; only perhaps his snakes outlived him. If they did, there can have been no false note in the pathos with which they spoke of him as "now no СКАЧАТЬ